Bethany Read online

  As I raked the bean-patch, Alex’s debt to the bank stood at £18,000 give or take a hundred or two. The only way of raising this sum was by sale of the London property which nobody wanted to buy, and in any case the debt probably now exceeded the property’s value. If the money was not found within about a year, the bank would start pressing Alex to sell Bethany. What could I do? The capital sum was so far beyond my reach that it might as well have been a million, while even the weekly compound interest, multiplying like a cancer, was approximately twice my weekly earnings. The only person who could save the situation was the person who had caused it, but Alex, who could always see a perplexing number of sides to every question, was paralysed by indecision. Make an effort to get a roof on the building? Advertise it yet again as it stood? Apply for a change in planning permission? Make Bethany over to me, in hope that the bank could not take it? Or just skip the country?

  ‘Oh, let’s go to the pub’: so these debates usually ended. Yet I felt that Alex could solve the problem if she really set her mind to it, and it sickened me to see it drift on, worsening a little every day, while she made plans for damming the stream to create a pool where we could grow water-chestnuts, or designed an improved geodesc dome, or went for drives round the countryside and came back with hundredweights of edible seaweed and irresistible pieces of cast iron. I would not have had her different. I just wished that once in a while she would earn some money. She was a very talented jeweller: she could have earned a lot.

  I raked and smoothed, raked and smoothed. A bean-patch. Alex’s idea. We would grow field beans, they required little care and would feed both us and the animals. I did not much like field beans and was fairly sure that Alex didn’t either, but I supposed they would do for the dogs. I had marked out three large patches separated by grassy strips. They really were large patches – this was only the first one, and already I had spent several days on it. Alex had brought home half a hundredweight of seed beans: we had to do something with them. It was typical of Alex: get an idea about growing something, buy ten times the amount of seed required, and leave me to sow it.

  As I worked, my feelings of anger and hopelessness grew. Was I never to have any peace? Struggling always in the wake of Alex’s impetuosity. She never seemed to struggle. She always did exactly what she felt like, and devil take anyone else. And now, having tossed around for twenty years on assorted seas of experience, she had finally sailed straight for the hurricane. She was going to open her house – my home – to a group of tee-total, non-smoking, love-thy-neighbour mystics who once they had moved in might never move out. After all, why should they? All places were the same to them, and the only time was the present. The concept that on such and such a date they would have to go back to the city was not likely to impress them as very meaningful.

  I would have to share the solitude of the woods with them. I would have to explain about keeping the dogs in and the cats out and the goats tethered and the ponies calm, and why they must not waste water or use bleach, and why the water sometimes went orange although it was not dangerous, and why the children must not go into the ruined cottage because it was dangerous. I would have to say all these things because Alex never thought of anything, and they would look at me with the gentle incredulity that drove me mad. All this I would have to bear, and I would have to stop eating eggs. It was insufferable; it must be prevented. I slammed the rake down edgeways on a clod of earth with such force that it sprang up again violently and jarred my wrist. Suddenly I started to cry.

  I don’t quite know what happened. Tears are always the release of a greater sorrow than one knowingly feels, but these tears were for my whole life. They convulsed me. I laid my head on my arms on the low stone wall and disintegrated. Part of me assumed the role of cinema projectionist and exhibited me to myself. I observed my behaviour: cold, selfish and calculating. I noted my complete inability to feel love, compassion or even genuine interest in response to another human being. I saw my pitiful arrogance and the void it was founded on. I looked at my heart and saw that it was a mean and frightened thing. I saw the faces of the people I had hurt. I saw Alex, brave, lost, indomitable, haunted by a spiritual need that drove her to excess after excess, a seeker whose quest I blocked at every turn, while at every failure she grew more desperate and I more sure of my deadening power. And I said that I loved her! Cruellest of all, I had made her believe it.

  Down that pit I fell, like Alice, slowly and with my eyes wide open. I could not stop the descent: something beyond me was forcing me down through every bitter level of my experience. Down, down, through the lies, betrayals and manipulations. Down through the utter aridity of a life lived only for self. Down to where, I wondered, for surely this despair could find its end only in death.

  ‘Let go.’ It was a whisper: Simon’s voice in my head.

  The descent stopped, then started again with a lurch. For I knew that I would not, and that it was because I would not that I was here weeping out my heart in a Cornish field, and that I had condemned myself most justly to the punishment of those who will not give up their misery. That is, their misery.

  ‘Let go.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Yes you can. These are all ideas. Let them go.’

  A breath of hope stirred in me. Suppose I tried letting them go just a little bit, and saw what happened?

  I suddenly had a vision of myself. A child standing on the seashore holding a cup of water. A child, its feet lapped by the waves, its ears filled with the roar of surf, fighting and screaming to retain sole possession of its tiny cup of water.

  I raised my head and looked around me. I saw a world I had not known I could perceive. It must be the world that very young children see, before they are taught words to nail it down and kill it. But it was not seeing, because sight is of something outside oneself, and this world was not outside me. It enveloped me, it breathed through me. The dancing leaves of a tree fifty yards away brushed my skin. A bird sped into the sky and the ground fell away beneath me. The soft spears of grass tickled my feet through the soles of my boots. Life blazed and throbbed in ceaseless ferment everywhere I turned my gaze; life prodigal, inexhaustible, beyond comprehension, filling and creating the universe and perhaps other universes not to be imagined. This was my birthright. To claim it all I had to do was …

  Humbly I wiped my face on my shirt and went to find Alex.

  Strangely, as soon as I realised how desirable it was that Simon and his friends should come to Bethany, Alex began to exhibit signs of disquiet. She urged me to go and see Simon without delay, but her joy at my conversion was already clouding when I got into the car to drive to the city.

  It was an extraordinary evening I spent there. Gently Simon talked me through my purgation; brilliantly he took up first one and then another of the things I had said, analysed them, and explored them with the relentless logic and daring intuition I had come to expect of him but which still left me breathless; finally, when I had followed him for three hours through these foothills without faltering, he took me by the hand and led me over mountain ranges of such height and splendour that at each step I thought I must fall, while at each step I climbed higher. Where I stood, at last, there was no thought, only perception which comprehended thought and all things. I knew that wherever I turned my eyes, I would understand completely. I knew that I would keep this pure perception as long, and only as long, as my heart was pure. I knew that I was nothing, and immortal.

  I left late in the evening and drove home with care. Alex was sitting on the half-finished patio steps in the moonlight, waiting for me. I knew at once that something had changed, and changed for ever.

  I had lived for seven years in Alex’s shadow. I was content with this: I had no liking for limelight. She was the talker, she was the doer, even if what she did was not always easy to determine. Quick of brain, lively of interest, warm of heart, with a smattering of information about almost everything and a complete originality of thought (resulting largely from
a complete lack of education), she shone like a star in the obscurity of the local pub. There the men, mostly labourers or unemployed, who had gone there most of their lives to get away from their womenfolk and discuss the best way of growing beans or building a hedge or picking a runner in the three-thirty, looked first with resentment, then with admiration, and finally with a fierce protective love at this slip of a woman, five foot four, who smoked cigars and bought her round, and drove a Thames truck as well as any of them, and had about her a gentleness which they had never seen in their wives. Their wives, of course, hated her.

  I was sufficiently sure of my own worth not to resent being eclipsed by Alex’s personality. In any case, I did not share Alex’s conviction of the innate superiority of the working class, and I thought she was welcome to the spoils. With our London friends I did sometimes feel I had been edged into a subservient position, and I reacted either by competing or by silence, depending on my mood. But I knew that it was as much my fault as hers. She removed from me the odious responsibility of being sociable.

  Inequalities of personality were aggravated by the fact that when we began to live together she had a house and a private income and I, having given up a job to leave London, had nothing at all. The psychological structure thus established persisted long after her income stopped and we were both living on my earnings. But in a sense these considerations were all superficial. Alex dominated, and I did not challenge her dominance however disastrous the results might be, because she had a rare and precious quality. I could not name it, but when I met her I knew that, having found it, I must never let it go.

  It was like a candle-flame that, however near to guttering, never quite goes out. It was at once an innocence, a wisdom and a strength. I had seen her draw on it to cope with situations in which I was utterly at a loss: Jacques nihilistic and blaspheming, with Manuela weeping in terror and the children white-faced against the wall; Manuela’s brother, black eyes burning, covering sheet after sheet of paper with pencil drawings of landscapes made out of faces, never looking up, never lifting the pencil, for six hours; gentle William, devastating in his lobotomised simplicity, asking after five minutes’ acquaintance if he could sleep with her; crazy Caroline, squatting on the unswept floor in her Highbury flat, working out numbers, working out the number of the house added to the numerical value of the street name plus the postal district, divided by the numerical value of her own name reduced to a single figure, because if the answer came out exactly she would survive the night in that house.

  Alcoholics, drug-addicts, schizophrenics, the lost and the damned – to all these people, from whom I drew back in fear because I could not begin to understand the darkness into which they had fallen, Alex found something to say. Across that terrible gulf she would lean and hold their hands, and they would look up for a moment and hope.

  It was a kind of grace. It came, obviously, from God, whatever that meant. Thus I acknowledged that Alex, however irrational, inconsiderate, wilful and self-opinionated, was better than me, and better in a way that transcended my scale of values. She had the true gold, the spark, the spirit. I bowed to it.

  And now I saw that I had been mistaken. Oh, it was there. But what a small, threatened thing it was, and how unsure of its way. How weak she was, this woman I had thought so strong. How puerile was the wisdom that held them spellbound in the pub. I knew; and, looking at me as I sat by her on the steps that night, she knew that I knew, and buried her face in my shoulder.

  All next day, and the day after that, we talked. I realised with growing dismay that she was in grave spiritual danger. I could see the light and the darkness struggle within her as she half-answered, parried or evaded my questions, or tried to translate what I was saying into something more congenial. She did not want to see Simon: she was afraid, as I had been. Or, rather, the darkness was afraid. I told her there was nothing to fear, but the dark thing writhed and lashed its tail and glared at me, and I knew that it was beyond my powers to remove it. The best I could do would be to hold her hand while one wiser than I brought her out of the shadows.

  I came home from work on the Monday and saw the Humber parked under the laurel tree. They were all there: Simon, Dao, and their three little girls, and Pete, Coral and the baby.

  ‘Kay!’ said Coral and hugged me. Dao, luminous with smiles, placed her hands palm-to-palm and inclined her head above them in the Eastern greeting. I responded, less gracefully, but from a full heart. Simon and Alex were talking in the garden. It was going to be all right, I thought, as I made the tea.

  We sat in the sun listening to the bees among the roses, and smiled at each other. Simon said it had been agreed that they should move in at the end of the week. He thought there should be a trial period, and asked for suggestions as to its length. No one volunteered a suggestion, so Simon said five months. We agreed.

  As Simon talked, I realised that what he had in mind was far more than a friendly house-sharing, far more even than a conventional commune. He wished to find out whether there was a new way for people to live together. A way that did not involve private will; a way that broke down the barriers between people until the will of the individual and the will of the group were one. A way in which communication flowed freely between people, unimpeded by motives arising from the self, so that a thing was no sooner thought than it was said, no sooner said than it was done, no sooner done than it was dismissed from the mind so that the next thing could be dealt with. A way in which there were no lies, no evasions and no secrets. A way in which there was no dwelling on the past and no dreaming of the future, but only total awareness of the timeless present. It was an amazing conception. Dimly I glimpsed the sort of power such a group would have.

  So that was why he wanted so long a trial period. With such an aim in view, there would be many problems to be overcome.

  But what was he saying now?

  ‘One sees that in this beautiful place there is something wrong. There is something not straight. It is like a broken limb. When a limb is broken you put a splint on it to keep it straight. Something strong and straight is tied to something weak and crooked, until the weak thing grows strong. That is what we are going to do here.’

  I had some difficulty in believing that he meant what he obviously had to mean. I glanced at Alex, who was smiling serenely. She doesn’t understand, I thought. I felt protective, and for a moment indignant.

  ‘A five-month splint. The Bethany splint.’

  Well, it was what I wanted, wasn’t it?

  2

  The Ark

  Simon, sipping his peppermint tea by the kitchen window, said, ‘The group has been in existence for a week. Are there any suggestions?’

  ‘Yes. Another week,’ said Coral with a broad smile.

  She looked blissfully happy, sitting on the floor feeding her baby. We had all taken to sitting on the floor. It was the only comfortable way six adults and three children could fit into the long, narrow kitchen at Bethany, and in any case there were never enough chairs in the house for visitors because of Alex’s deep-rooted hostility to furniture.

  Alex and I had never encouraged sitting on the floor because, trodden constantly by three dogs, the floor had never been very clean; but now it shone with a lustre we dimly remembered from years ago when the lino had just been laid. Unlike Alex and me, Coral and Dao did not regard the fact that a thing would immediately get dirty again as a good reason for not washing it. The whole house sparkled.

  ‘It’s very nice here,’ said Coral in her American drawl, and then smiled again at the inadequacy of the statement. I studied the slim figure, in white shirt and faded jeans, resting easily against the wooden cupboard. The lazy brown eyes and sensuous mouth were full of gentleness as she looked down at the baby and cupped her breast to help him. It was difficult to imagine hardness in that face, but Coral had hinted that there were many things in her past that did not bear examination. She was, I thought, to a greater extent than any of us, a refugee. She had stopped running,
now.

  I glanced at the others. Pete. Immediately I experienced the slight withdrawal I was never quick enough to stop. I had tried to like Pete, I had catalogued to myself his virtues and tried to return his open smile with an equally open one of my own, but it was no use. Confronted by Pete, my heart did not open up to welcome him, it closed like a clam.

  What was it? His appearance? The black beard, hairy chest, powerful arms? Yes, he repelled me, even slightly alarmed me, as did all very masculine men, but I knew that I could have forgiven Pete his abundance of hormones were it not for the two other qualities he combined with them: a level of intellect which I despised and an intuition I had to respect.

  How these two qualities came to co-exist in the same person I could only explain by Pete’s long association with Simon. Pete was a simple, straightforward man, ill-educated and not very articulate, but on this ordinary material had been superimposed something of Simon’s extraordinary perception and Simon’s wide-ranging knowledge. The result was a man capable of remarkable intuitions and well acquainted with Eastern thought, who was quite unable to express himself in terms that could be understood. Sometimes I listened to Pete trying to express an idea, and it was like listening to a peasant who had once, long ago, seen a wonderful thing in a dream. Yet, at other times I was not so sure. Simon, Dao and Coral seemed to understand without any trouble what he meant. I had even seen Alex engage in discussion with him when I could not make head or tail of what he was saying. So perhaps there was something wrong with me?

  The disturbance this idea caused me largely accounted for my difficulties with Pete. Objectively I acknowledged him to be a kind, helpful and considerate man: inwardly, the moment I saw him I recoiled. Physical distaste, sexual antagonism, intellectual disdain: it was a potent mixture, I thought, and none of it to my credit. I resolved to try harder to like him. If I indulged it, my stupid egotism could wreak havoc here.